Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

The creepy Countess Elizabeth Bathory used a bootleg version of a video game to select her victims in the surprisingly effective Stay Alive , featuring Frankie Muniz (TV’s Malcolm in the Middle ). The “unrated director’s cut” on DVD was fifteen minutes longer than the soft PG-13 version briefly released in movie theatres.

A woman (Radha Mitchell) searched for her sick daughter in the zombie-haunted town of Silent Hill . Christophe Gans’ confusing adaptation of the video game opened at #1 in the US. Sean Bean played hapless husbands in both Silent Hill and The Dark , John Fawcett’s low budget chiller in which another mother (Maria Bello) searched for her missing daughter after staying at a creepy Welsh house, where a religious cult once committed mass suicide.

Jeff Broadstreet’s Night of the Living Dead 3D , featuring Sid Haig, was a long way from George Romero’s original series.

Demi Moore played a successful novelist who moved to a remote Scottish village where she was apparently haunted by the ghost of her recently-deceased young son in Craig Rosenberg’s curiously old-fashioned British thriller Half Light . In Hadi Hajaig’s overly ambitious Puritan , Nick Moran starred as a washed-up paranormal investigator involved in a Gothic mystery in modern Whitechapel.

David Payne’s Keeker was about a group of students in a creepily deserted desert motel menaced by mutilated ghosts and the titular monster, while Renny Harlin’s The Covenant was based on Aron Coleite’s graphic novel about teenage warlocks and flopped at the box-office.

Lucky McKee’s long-delayed second feature The Woods , featuring Bruce Campbell, finally saw the light of day, and something nasty lurked on a deserted island in Michael J. Bassett’s survivalist horror Wilderness , featuring ubiquitous Brit actor Sean Pertwee overseeing a group of violent young offenders who were killed off by a crazed psycho.

David Zucker’s uneven comedy Scary Movie 4 spoofed The Grudge, Saw, The Village and, er . . . Brokeback Mountain . Pamela Anderson, Charlie Sheen, Cloris Leachman, Shaquille O’Neal and Dr. Phil turned up in embarrassing cameos. Incredibly, it opened at #1 in the US and #2 in the UK in April.

Despite a huge, Internet-fuelled publicity build-up, David R. Ellis’ entertaining Snakes on a Plane didn’t quite live up to the pre-release hype as Samuel L. Jackson’s tough-talking FBI agent had to contend with . . . a plane full of 400 deadly snakes. Although it opened in both the US and UK at #1, not screening the film for critics prior to release apparently harmed its chances at the box-office.

Director Joon-ho Bong’s clever and amusing The Host ( Gwoemul ) had a giant mutant fish creature created by toxic waste storing its human victims in Seoul’s sewers. It was a huge box-office hit in its native Korea. Su-chang Kong’s R-Point was a Korean production about a cursed island and the spirits of the dead soldiers who were trapped there.

In Marc Forster’s clever metaphysical fantasy Stranger Than Fiction , Will Ferrell’s lonely tax inspector Harold Crick discovered that he was a character about to be killed off in author Emma Thompson’s latest novel. Ewan McGregor’s psychiatrist found his life beginning to merge with Ryan Gosling’s suicidal art student in Forster’s other release of the year, the hopelessly pretentious Stay .

Rival Victorian illusionists Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman attempted to destroy each other with real magic in Christopher Nolan’s flashback-driven The Prestige , based on the novel by Christopher Priest. Meanwhile, Edward Norton’s turn-of-the-century magician used his powers to free the woman he loved in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist , which also starred Paul Giamatti.

M. Night Shyamalan’s overly complicated fable Lady in the Water featured Giamatti’s apartment complex loner protecting Bryce Dallas Howard’s mysterious mermaid from toothy creatures from another dimension.

Guillermo del Toro had far more success creating an alternate reality in his sumptuous Pan’s Labyrinth . Set in Franco’s civil war-ravaged Spain of 1944, the young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) discovered that she was really a princess and must complete three tasks to return to her magical underground kingdom.

Despite being directed by Dave McKean and scripted by Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask was a dull combination of live action and digital animation as sulky young circus girl Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) found herself transported into a bizarre fantasy world. Meanwhile, the Brothers Quay looked at the links between creativity and madness in their surreal feature The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes .

Filmed during a break in the making of The Brothers Grimm , Terry Gilliam’s Tideland was an odd Southern Gothic about a lonely little girl (Jodelle Ferland) growing up in an old derelict house and her encounters with the bizarre locals.

Darren Aronofsky’s long-in-development The Fountain , which starred Hugh Jackman as three different characters in history searching for immortality and love with the writer-director’s real-life partner Rachel Weisz, died at the box-office, despite wasting $18 million before it was ever made.

Hans Horn’s Adrift was about a group of old friends on a luxury yacht who all dived overboard before they realised that they had forgotten to lower the ladder, leaving them stranded in open sea. A toxic terrorist attack on Los Angeles looked at the human fallout in a city under siege in Chris Gorak’s impressive directorial debut Right at Your Door .

Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland starred in Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting , a not-really ghost story set in the early 19th century and “based on true events”, while a student (Sandra Hüller) thought she was possessed by the Devil in Requiem .

Rock musicians Jack Black and Kyle Gass were on the trail of a mythical Satanic guitar plectrum in the uneven comedy Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny .

For film-goers who thought they had seen it all before, Denzel Washington’s ATF agent used advanced digital surveillance to “travel back through time” to prevent a terrorist bombing in Tony Scott’s high-concept SF thriller Déjà Vu , which also featured Val Kilmer and Jim Caviezel. Keanu Reeves’ architect and Sandra Bullock’s doctor exchanged letters through time in Alejandro Agresti’s romantic drama The Lake House .

Nathan Fillion was the likeable small town sheriff who had to contend with a killer alien plague that turned the townsfolk into zombies in Slither , writer/director James Gunn’s inventive and entertaining tribute to 1950s SF movies. Made on a pathetically low budget, Jake West’s dire SF/comedy Evil Aliens , about extraterrestrial rapists in Wales, somehow managed to get a (mercifully brief) theatrical release in the UK.

Alfonso Cuarón’s impressive Children of Men , based on a novel by P. D. James, was set in a dystopian near-future where women could no longer give birth. Clive Owen’s reluctant hero had to deliver the last pregnant woman to safety with the help of Michael Caine’s aging hippie. The film opened at #1 in the UK in September.

Utilising a rotoscoped animation process, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly was based on the novel by Philip K. Dick and starred two-dimensional representations of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. Along the same lines, Christian Volckman’s animated French film Renaissance was shot in motion-captured black and white and featured a tough detective (voiced by Daniel Craig) searching for a missing geneticist in a dystopian Paris of the near-future.